Farbacher is confident it happened between 3 and 4:15 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2000.

And he is pretty sure he knows who pulled the trigger.

But in 10 years, the detective has never been able to do much about it. Knowing it is one thing;
proving it in court is quite another.

He still needs someone who knows a detail or two to come forward; he needs more concrete
evidence. He needs something, anything at all.

"Chico Ballard was a hard-working college kid ... who lived a good life, doing his best to get
by. And this?" Farbacher said recently while flipping through an inch-thick stack of crime-scene
photos. "This is a planned execution. This is a Hollywood hit."

The big brick house at 328 E. 17th Ave. was beyond rundown. It probably should have been
condemned. The back door didn't lock and homeless men sometimes squatted in the junk-filled
basement.

But to a 22-year-old struggling college kid, the rent was cheap and it was home. Chico Ballard
in Apartment A was the building's sole paying tenant.

Leo Felix and Chico became best friends when they met as pre-engineering students in an OSU
orientation class in summer 1995. For Leo, Chico was the kind of person you only find once in
life.

"He gave me somebody I could depend on for anything," he said. "We were college kids, trying to
figure out where we were heading. And I didn't have a clear picture. He did. He had a
direction."

Leo was among a group of friends who stayed at Chico's apartment into the early-morning hours of
Feb. 8, 2000. He says they probably watched a basketball game, maybe a movie. It's been too long to
say for certain.

Leo was the last to leave.

As he walked out the back door a little before 3 a.m., someone was hiding in the dark, watching,
listening, waiting for him to leave.

Over the next day and a half, Leo and his friends paged Chico dozens of times. No answer.

Chico, a mechanical-engineering major from the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights who was at
Ohio State on a full academic scholarship, uncharacteristically missed his 3 to 7p.m. telemarketing
shift at a Columbus call center on Feb. 8. And he didn't show up for his 8 a.m. class on Feb.
9.

Frantic, Leo returned to the apartment that afternoon. He smelled something strange.

Even now, as the 33-year-old debt-collector from Reynoldsburg recounts the story, he wrinkles
his nose as if he can still smell it. It was as if something had burned.

Leo didn't see any evidence of a fire, and his friend still wasn't home. Leo never checked the
basement. He left and paged more friends. Just before 6 p.m. on Feb. 9, Chico's girlfriend called
police.

Farbacher got the call. It didn't take him long to piece it all together:

The steps leading to the basement were right inside the broken back door, and Chico's apartment
door was just to the right of it.

When Leo left, the killer probably was already waiting in the basement.

It appeared that Chico rifled through a dresser drawer, probably looking for a candle or a
flashlight, detectives theorized. He grabbed the handgun he kept for protection - this wasn't the
first rough neighborhood he had lived in - and he grabbed his keys, maybe to lock his apartment
door behind him.

His Nike flip-flops would have slapped against the eight wooden basement steps as he made his
way down in the dark.

Once he stepped off the bottom step, the killer's shot rang out. Chico fell, his own gun
underneath him, his keys still clutched in his left hand. He never got off a shot of his own.

Then, the killer set fire to the body.

When she got the phone call, Marcia Ballard simply couldn't process the news.

Her oldest son was dead. This was the son who took toasters and televisions apart as a kid just
to see how they worked. This was the son who was building go-karts and hot rods in the garage
before his age reached double digits.

This was the one who loved math. This was her game player who who loved chess so much he kept
the board out as decoration in his sparsely furnished apartment.

And this was her Chico, the son who wrote her poems just because he loved her and e-mailed her
prayers every morning.

"Such a waste," said Marcia, who now lives in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights, not far
from Chico's older sister and younger brother. "He had so much to offer."

Her Chico had gone away to college to become a man; a killer had sent him home to her in an
urn.

Farbacher quickly zeroed in on a suspect. He'd heard about two confrontations Chico had had with
a former clerk at what was then a BP gas station at the corner of Summit Street and 17th Avenue,
less than a half-block from his apartment.

The two had argued over the tax on a pack of cigars once, and friends said that another time the
clerk followed Chico to his apartment and they again exchanged words.

Farbacher questioned the man, who admitted to the run-ins. But he insisted that he knew nothing
about anyone's death.

A week later, a Columbus burglary detective who knew nothing about the homicide called Chico's
girlfriend. He told her that two Columbus police officers had stopped a man in a ski mask who had
been trying to use her debit card at an ATM. Did she know when she had lost it?

She said she hadn't lost her card. But her boyfriend had carried one with her name on it, and
he'd recently been murdered.

The burglary detective and Farbacher realized they had a link. The guy had tried to use the card
at an ATM on 17th Avenue around 4:15 a.m. on Feb. 8, about 90 minutes after Leo had last seen Chico
alive. The man with the card was the former clerk at the BP.

Farbacher interviewed the man again. He told the detective that he had found the card a couple
of days earlier on the steps of a bagel shop. Because Chico hadn't used the card for several days
before his murder, there was no way to prove he hadn't simply lost the card and someone else had
picked it up.

On circumstance, the link appeared to be a lock. But prosecutors and courts don't operate on
suppositions. They need proof. A search warrant of the suspect's apartment yielded nothing.

The police were stuck. There was little they could do.

Over the years, Farbacher has considered that his theory could be wrong. He has looked at other
scenarios, other people and other motives, but he remains convinced of the former clerk's guilt.
The man now lives in the Cincinnati area.

Farbacher has never let this one go. And neither has Chico's family.

Juaneal Ballard was a junior in high school when his older brother died. The two were close, and
he still misses Chico's guidance.

"I think that whoever did it should know and fully understand that they took something special
away from this world. I don't think they realize what they were doing at the time, and they should
realize it wasn't just wrong because it was against the law.

"They should have to face that. Not just in court, but in the mirror."